Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations

by Eamon Duffy

Publisher:

Bloomsbury Continuum

, 2012

In this wide-ranging book, Professor Eamon Duffy explores the broad sweep of the English Reformation, and the ways in which that Reformation has been written about.

Tracing the fraught history of religious change in Tudor England, and the retellings of that history to shape a protestant national identity, once again he emphasizes the importance of the study of late medieval religion and material culture for our understanding of this most formative and fascinating of eras.

Getting to grips with the misconceptions, discontinuities and dilemmas which have dogged the history of Tudor religion, he traces the lived experience of Catholicism in an age of upheaval: from what it meant to be a Catholic in early Tudor England; through the nature of militant Catholicism at the height of the conflict; to the after-life of Tudor Catholicism and the ways in which the 'old religion' was remembered and spoken about in the England of Shakespeare.

Duffy writes at all times with grace, elegance and wit as he questions prejudices and myths about the Reformation, to demonstrate that the truth about the past is never pure nor simple.

Features

An entirely original view of English Reformation history.

Contents

List of Plates and Figures

Part I: Reformation Unravelled
Introduction
1. Reformation, Counter-reformation and the English nation
2. Reformation Unravelled: Facts and Fictions

Part II: The Material Culture of Early Tudor Catholicism
3. The Parish, Piety and Patronage: the Evidence of Roodscreens
4. Salle Church and the Reformation
5. The End of It All: Medieval Church Goods and the 1552 Confiscations

Part III: Two Cardinals
6. John Fisher and the Spirit of his Age
7. The Religion of John Fisher
8. Rome and Catholicity in mid-Tudor England
9. Cardinal Pole and Archbishop Cranmer

Part IV: Catholic Voices
10. The Conservative Voice in the English Reformation
11. Remembering Catholicism in Shakespeare's England

Notes
Acknowledgements
Index

Praise for Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition

This book is a collection of essays on various aspects of early modern English religion which Duffy has written over the past fifteen years, complemented by a few previously unpublished pieces. Collections like that can be annoyingly miscellaneous, but here the stronger impression is of the unity of his body of work. A series of strong, consistent ideas emerges. Nobody who knows Duffy's robust approach to the Reformation will be surprised by anything that is here, but they will still find it worth reading.

There is something compelling and even thrilling about Duffy's combination of cutting-edge historical scholarship and effortless prose.

Product Details

• Title: Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations
• Author: Eamon Duffy
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Continuum
• Print Publication Date: 2012
• Logos Release Date: 2024
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Ebook
• ISBNs: 9781441133427, 9781472909176, 1472909178, 1441133429
• Resource ID: LLS:9781441133427
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2024-05-12T15:39:39Z

About Eamon Duffy

Eamon Duffy is Emeritus Professor of Christian History at the University of Cambridge and a past president of Magdalene College. One of the world’s most influential and widely respected historians, his previous books include the bestselling The St... (Yale University Press, 1994), The Voices of Morebath (Yale University Press, 2001) Fires of Faith (Yale University Press, 2009) and Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition (Bloomsbury, 2012).